2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
Imagine you have no skin.
Most likely we would have crumbled.
A million bacteria, microbes, substances will immediately penetrate into us, causing irreparable harm to organs and all systems.
We would be everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
Everything and nothing.
In fact, they would cease to exist.
Skin is our border with the world.
It makes us a separate organism.
With its own individual needs and peculiarities of functioning.
Also with psychological boundaries.
They are there so that we exist as separate individuals, and not just organisms.
My boundary tells me what I want and what I don't want.
How pleasant it is for me, but how unpleasant it is.
What and how suits me, and what does not suit me.
It protects me from what is dangerous, destructive, and harmful to me.
My boundary helps me to be whole. Be yourself.
There is, of course, one caveat. I can only recognize my boundaries by touching another boundary. And at the same time I have some sensations, feelings.
As with the skin. I touch various objects and feel where my hand ends, for example, and where something else begins. At the same time, I can experience a variety of bodily sensations that "signal" whether it is pleasant to me or not, it is dangerous, safe, I want to or I don’t want to. This is how my desires, further reactions, behavior are born. I am born.
I can contact in the same way with people, values, beliefs, ideas, etc.
In an ideal world where everyone respects and notices each other's boundaries, it would be easy for us to keep them.
Unfortunately, this is rarely the case. The world is small. Resources are limited. We are too different. We often have to compete. And in order to take what I want or live the way that suits me, I need to violate the boundaries of the other.
People adapt in every possible way to such conditions. Manipulation, deception, rejection, ignorance, resentment, anger, violence …
We learn how to deal with personal boundaries in childhood. The reactions of significant adults to our manifestations are shaped by this knowledge.
For example
- in order to be loved, I only need to want what the other wants, otherwise they will be rejected, punished
-if I say no, I will move away, I will hurt another and he will leave
-my desires, my needs are too selfish, if I satisfy them, then I do not love anyone
- others know better what I want, how I like it and how it fits
- if you love a person, everything should fit and you like everything, the difference is dislike
-if I sacrifice something, I give up, the other will do the same for me
-my reactions hurt others, they feel bad
- if I get angry, turn away from me, they will ignore
….
Each person has his own "rules" why you should not show your boundaries.
In my experience, there is the knowledge that intimacy is a violation of boundaries. If you want to be intimate with someone, be prepared to push your boundaries. Doing what you don’t want to do, keeping silent when you don’t like it, choosing what doesn’t fit. The right to personal needs and desires seems to disappear.
This is how my family system was arranged, in which I grew up.
Naturally, I carry this model into every relationship, which makes them unbearable for me and prompts me to leave.
An interesting point is that I simply transferred my old knowledge into completely different relationships, without even specifying, without clarifying those moments in which I was “forced” to move my boundaries. Maybe it wasn’t important for the other person or not at all ?! Moving my boundaries, I was angry with my partner, because it was he who “makes” me do it.
Of course it is not. My border is my responsibility. If I choose to move it, it's only my choice, and it doesn't matter why or why.
I am for flexibility of boundaries, for the possibility of movement. Just so that I do not suffer from this, it is better to do it openly in the process of dialogue and agreements. It is important to be prepared for the fact that you can become uncomfortable, bad, cause some feelings in another person, and face all sorts of manipulations. After all, he is trying to satisfy his need, which means to expand or maintain personal boundaries.
Respect for each other's boundaries and dialogue at the point of contact can help us to touch, be flexible and maintain our integrity, being in the free movement of approaching and moving away.
And if you forget about your boundaries? Remember what happens if our skin disappears.
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